Hello, and apologies for dropping this.
I've decided to take a rather unorthodox approach to this. I realise that I don't really have time to do a detailed AAR. However, I do have time to do a summary of campaigns focussing on small, but important, countries, many of which being countries that players might not normally pick, or even consider viable. Essentially, these will be quick, summative reports of a campaign; the 1936-39 build up, the background, the important battles and the make up of the army, as well as, of course, the ultimate outcome.
I will be starting with a summation of a rather brief campaign as Denmark, where my small army of three infantry divisions, one anti-aircraft division, and a whole lot of dead New Zealanders, managed to hold up the might of the German army and airforce for five months, by holing up on Zeeland island, off the coast of Jutland, the Danish mainland, and the site of the Danish capital of Copenhagen... a campaign that nonetheless got more of my men killed than it did the Germans.
First of all; why Denmark? Well, historically, Denmark was one of the nations that didn't put up a fight when Germany invaded, knowing full well they'd be crushed if they resisted. Denmark was a peaceful country which distrusted the military, and their government decided it would be more humane to accept the inevitable rather than fight and get a lot of Danes killed in what they knew would be a full-on blitz of Copenhagen. The Germans met only scattered resistance as they entered the country, before Denmark essentially threw up their hands in surrender.
I decided to go for a rather ahistorical approach, choosing to commandeer an Ax-Crazy, stubborn Denmark who would resist the Germans down to the last man as if possessed of the viking spirit of old. So, on I went.
Now first of all, I can't credit the strategy I used to give Denmark a fighting chance to myself. It was actually the person who wrote the guide to Denmark on the Hearts Of Iron III wiki who gave me the basic outline. Essentially, Denmark is made out of its mainland in Jutland, and two small islands, and each of the areas has a victory point. Three victory points, and the last one is in Copenhagen in Zeeland, the taking of which requires an amphibious landing.
It is hard to consider a taller order than forcing a 1939 German army to try to make an amphibious landing against a small front, stuffed to the teeth with modern weaponry and sheltered by AA. The theory went that if you fortify Copenhagens single ferry crossing, you can hold the German army up almost indefinitely. And so, in the mood for pulling off the impossible, off I went.
Denmark only gave me enough manpower for a force of four infantry divisions and my air cover, counting the two reserve formations I started with. I tried to get a land fort constructed to help defend the crossing to Zeeland, but that was beyond me. What I did manage to do was to get one of the most modern infantry and anti-aircraft forces in the game up to that point, though the fact that I had to split my puny 3.25 research points between infantry and anti-air probably contributed towards my defeat. I had to make a tough call between getting 1940 level small arms or getting 140% officers at the wars beginning rather than what I ended up with (around 110%.) Given the difference the arms probably made in piling up the German casualties, I'm glad I went for the small arms.
War broke out in 1939 of course, and immediately I ran into problems. It turned out that my single anti-aircraft division was hopelessly inadequate to holding off the German Luftwaffe, though my three divisions did indeed give the Germans utter hell. Poland didn't help matters by folding in 7 weeks; historically they held out for 3 months. At first, the Poles took off the worst of the pressure. France didn't help by giving up the Maginot line and placing absolutely no pressure on the Germans; instead, throughout the campaign they uselessly piled their forces up in the cities. Ever heard of a stacking penalty?!
Frances stupidity aside, my first battle against Germany, for this reason, went superbly. The Germans sent a single division of motorised against the crossing, but gave up as soon as they realised the impossibility of the task. El Fuhrer then reinforced this with a further three divisions and some half-hearted air support.
The result was a whole lot of shot down planes, some rather bruised Danish formations, and 4000 dead Germans. I took heavy casualties from the bombardment (nothing compared to the damage done to the attacking hawks) but I only took a handful of men down to the actual beach fighting!
Things didn't last though. Two more battles followed, each one getting worse. The Luftwaffe started hitting my divisions several times a day; at first my anti-aircraft guns did the job, but ultimately, they started getting worn down, and eventually I had to withdraw them to Copenhagen in the hope that I might be able to reinforce them. They were down to 25% of their strength. The German casualties were still piling up, but that was sore comfort to my battered divisions; of the 35000 odd men that survived the initial confrontation, 29000 were left standing at the end.
I lost 6000 men to aircraft bombardment. And thats when it all started to unravel.
The next battle was a grim case of survival. This was when I brought in my reserve division (note I had four divisions of infantry; three as frontline and one as reinforcements to allow the others to recover) because my troops began to suffer from disorganisation due to being inadequately rested. But the real problem was that the Luftwaffe had sapped away most of my divisions strength. By the end of the fighting, sure, there were still a lot of dead Germans on the field, about 4000-6000 a shot over three major battles. But without any effective air cover, my troops were steadily butchered; it wasn't long until I was struggling along with 50% strength forces. I sent my AA units back in to help, but by this point, the Luftwaffe was merciless, and it wasn't long until they shattered.
Leaving me with no help whatsoever against the bombs.
And then Poland fell, and we know who was next on Hitlers shopping list!
Many of you will be thinking "wait a minute, why was Denmark fighting at the same time as Poland? Denmark wasn't invaded until 1940!" The reason I decided to go in at the 1939 start was specifically because I knew that was when Germany would be at its most distracted; I wanted to tie up as many German formations as possible. It worked too; almost seven divisions were tied up in the north trying to shift my tiny little Danish army; this got so bad that the Germans stripped away the defenses around the parts of the Maginot line that they had seized; the result was that the French broke through and took Saarbrucken and the northern half of the Siegfried line. They didn't take long losing part of it, but Saarbrucken was still in French hands.
It was once Poland fell that things started to go wrong. I was hit by about seven divisions, and this time the Germans brought along infantry who were actually good at amphibious landings rather than panzers who essentially made big, waterlogged target practice for my Danish forces. I quickly started to take crippling losses, and it wasn't long until I started losing organisation more quickly than I could replenish it. By this point, some divisions were down to 30% strength; I'd lost most of my army. I briefly earned a reprieve when some woefully underequipped New Zealander forces answered my cries for some kind of help from... Britain. Who were much closer and were in a position to actually make a difference with the RAF. At this point though things were hopeless; a few New Zealander infantry divisions with 1918 equipment couldn't do anything to stop the masses of German bombs falling on my beleaguered forces. In the end, all they achieved was adding their own corpses to the masses of Danish and German ones piled up on that god-forsaken coastline.
Eventually, two weeks into January, my defenses gave out completely, and the Germans quickly took over. I promptly gave my remaining forces to Britain; they're currently sunning themselves on a tiny island off of the Danish coast.
In the end, I took more casualties than the Germans did. However, I did kill somewhere in the region of 22,000 German soldiers, so I think its safe to say that I gave Hitler more trouble than the historical Danes did. However... the historical Danes also didn't get their entire male population and a good chunk of the New Zealander one slaughtered fighting a lost cause. My plan didn't really work; it might have worked better if instead of building another infantry division I'd substituted in an extra unit of AA. But I was in a pretty tough spot.
Well, thats it. I'm either going to move on to the same save file and play as France to see if I can avert the fall of France, or I'll try a campaign as Turkey, where the objective is to protect Greece from Italian... and any one elses... occupation, and liberate Albania. And I'll have to watch out for those nasty Bulgarians and Romanians, not to mention their German bosses, as well.
